MSE Branded Foods is a provider of consolidated food courts, nationally branded concepts and full service restaurants and bars. From planning and contracting with the optimal mix of national brands to staffing and operating on site, MSE has quickly grown into a leading provider of turnkey solutions that span a multitude of food service needs.

Along with MSE’s rapid growth and expansion into complex locations such as airports, new challenges emerged. One of the most critical involved finding a point-of-sale (POS) system capable of making sense of massive amounts of transactional data, according to Ed Jones, Vice President of Finance, MSE Branded Foods.

“Before our expansion into the airport business, we were operating about 12 locations and we only had two or three POS systems and very simple, standalone cash registers without any linkage between different locations,” says Jones. “We might have as many as nine separate outlets at one location with absolutely no connection.”

Due to a lack of integration, Jones says MSE managers typically spent numerous hours accumulating data on a daily basis in order to compile it into a crude worksheet format.

“We needed a POS system as a common platform in all of our locations and chose Maitre’D primarily due to the fact that they had the flexibility to handle fast food, casual dining, bars, retail outlets and a myriad of other different locations,” says Jones.

MSE installed Maitre’D one system at a time, and overall, Jones says the experts at Maitre’D were very flexible, accommodating and thorough. Once up-and running, Jones says Maitre’D helped eliminate hours of number crunching at the close of each business day. Another valuable benefit is the plethora of valuable management data that MSE is able to pull out of the system at any point in time; data that the company never had access to before.

“It’s been wonderful to see what’s been going on from a sales and labor perspective,” says Jones. “We have a back office system that gathers all of the data from all of the different locations. First thing in the morning we have detailed reports right at our fingertips. We also have access to real time data over the Internet. I can view our business activity in real time from just about anywhere.”

Thanks in part to the robust functionality of Maitre’D, the close-out process for MSE locations was reduced from two hours to two minutes. “It was so short, sweet and to-the-point, my management team and I thought we might have missed something,” relates Jones. “We started our expansion into airports around the same time that we started implementing Maitre’D. Looking back, we could not have done it successfully without them.”